Root Beer Floats On The Road To Tomorrow
LOOK AROUND. WHAT CAN YOU SEE? Kids are finishing their classes and… and… Looking for summer jobs!
AAAAIEEEEE!!!!!
The time for the dreaded “Summer Job” has reared its ugly head once again! God, I am glad I don’t have to get involved with that insanity any longer.
My teenage summer jobs were back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and we were paid in shiny stones. Times have changed in many ways, but today’s kids still have to go through the same job searching rigamarole for the same lousy equivalent in today’s currency.
“But it will look so good on your resume!”
No it won’t.
No one cares that you spent the summer making Root Beer Floats for your unemployed and happier friends. Most Human Resources Pros who really hire people are just thrilled to find someone who doesn’t have an arrest record and who can pee into a plastic cup without bursting into flames. The ability to make Root Beer Floats doesn’t carry a lot of weight.
With the school year ending there are hordes of teens sniffing around the edges of the economy looking for something to do that will give them a way to keep their parents off their backs about spending the summer playing video games and field testing condoms in the back seat of the family car.
The best summer jobs have already been scarfed down by the nerdy kids. They started their job search back around Groundhog Day and, in many cases, are taking home more money than their parents. They are spending the summer working for NASA or in the Silicon Valley or curing obscure tropical diseases. Of course these kids will waste their money on things like textbooks and computer software. The young thugs who are just now looking for those Root Beer Float leftover jobs will blow their paltry wages on antibiotics and cheap booze. But they’ll have more fun and have much better stories to tell in September.
Faced with parental pressure and economic mythology some of those kids are begging for jobs, but any job that could be filled by an angry and semi-literate teenager is a job that could just as easily be performed by a Geezer like me or a nervous opossum in heavy traffic.
Go ahead. Hire a person with snarky kid with no experience, no common sense, and the complete inability to make change. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to deal with a terminally vague seventeen year old whose eyes go blank when faced with the task of giving me back the change when I hand him a twenty dollar bill for a $9.18 tab. He begins to sweat and asks for help.
Whether or not a teenage kid gets a summer job really doesn’t matter in the long run. They’ll not earn enough to make a difference. They won’t learn any job skills that will translate into any possible future success, and most of them will be lucky if they aren’t fired before the Fourth of July. Let’s face it – once the weather gets warm and the pools and water parks open the little geniuses will “Call in sick” or just disappear like Jimmy Hoffa.
Take two aspirin and call me in the morning. They are the future.
Down the Hall on Your Left 
John, my favorite way to confuse today’s teen employee is to give them $20.18 for a $9.18 tab. They literally meltdown in front of me. See you in Cleveland. Joyce
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Absolutely
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Hey, I hear some of the new McDonald’s being built have registers that not only tell how much change to give back but what denomination, Please give customer two quarters…one dime… and 1 penny. But of course they still have to type into the machine how much money you gave them in the first place. If you want to really confuse one of them, tell them your going to pay for half with cash and the other half with a debit card.
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That’s just asking for trouble
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Hilarious, John. And true!
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